Data conversion, and producing documentation to meet the requirements of some process standard or other is widespread in most technical industry. It is often done after the event. Many years ago I did a contract to write a design document for an in-service product. Our is not to reason why....
Companies like freelancers to do this because:
a) they can get a fixed price for a document that present little risk to the freelancer (its either a good or bad document its a qualitative measure)
b) no permanent staff want to do such boring work, so they would be happy for an outsider to come in and do it and make their nagging boss go away, while providing the appropriate tick-in-the-box to make the QA man go away too...
c) they dont have the overhead of a full time staffer on the project
I hope you get the job. I think because such a job that can be done almost anywhere it has plenty of potential for really flexible working...
dave
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75CHF is the get down and get your hands dirty hourly rate, as I have been advised. That is collaborating with engineers and the like, and producing docs in HTML, XML and some with adobe framemaker etc as well, depending on how much $ the Co. wants to spend on their doc dept). That comes out to about 145k CHF per year based on a 40 hour week, and that's once you calculate in the 20 days holiday etc too. On such a freelance rate though that doesn't afford you paid sick days. Would suit me fine.... just hope I get the job! As for my expactations for a gross salary, I based it on the fact that my man with 6 months experience got an IT job at 82k and then got a raise to 100k after 3 months. With that, taking in to account that I'm female (salary calculators do seem to indicate that women still get lower pay for the same job) but still have 3 years technical experience plus the academic stuff, 85k would be reasonably modest. And if you're a whizz on HTML/XML and single sourcing you should be able to afford a bit more confidence with your salary request.
But then Tech managers seem to place quite a low importance on documentation and are reluctant to pay too much... Any managers out there who can comment?
Working with single source data seems to be a prerequisite too. Is that the case all over Europe and is it relatively recent?
My experience has been working mostly with bog standard MS Word. Some docs were up to 1000 pages too, so you can imagine the nightmare with that! But because it was a very archaic governmental military defence department, their systems could only handle Word97!  ... So am having to teach myself to use these things. | |
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